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I’ve got good news.

1) Teacher’s whisky is £11 in Morrison’s. 28 units. Oh dear, Puritans. Oh dear indeed. Clan McGregor is £11 and some pennies. I’ll get some tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll visit Lidl for Ben Bracken and some ‘My Lidl Pony’ burgers. I’m not going to Smoky-Drinky in this weather. That cracked rib has only just stopped hurting.

2) The heating is fixed thanks to Friendly Local Cash-accepting Plumber. Replacing the fan did the trick. So I still don’t have a condensing boiler and the fan heaters can go back into storage.

3) I am not working tomorrow. Boss has hurt her back. I consider it rude and most improper to ask how a young and attractive woman came to have hurt her back. Instead I rely on my filthy imagination to fill in the details. It’s probably much more interesting than reality anyway. So I am working Sunday afternoon instead. Doesn’t matter, I have whisky for tonight and the prospect of saving it for tomorrow night was always a slim one. Now I don’t have to exercise self-control. Excellent. I could never understand those who want to control others. I’m not even interested in controlling me.

4) Poundland have Goblin tinned stewed steak and it’s exactly as I remember it. Looks like dog food, smells like dog food, heat it up and it magically turns into chunks in gravy and it’s as salty as in the old days. Lovely. The Health Nazis would swoon at the sight of it and die if they tasted it. Must get more before it’s banned.

5) That gum you like is going to come back in style.

6) Signed copy of ‘Samuel’s Girl’ to the first one who tells me where no. 5 comes from. Might not be in the post for a week, mind. I’m still on double shifts so far.

And now, lathes and genitalworms, it is time for me to take leave of this world for a short time and enter the sanity of whisky oblivion accompanied by a film of horribleness called, this evening, ‘night watch’.

It’s in Russian. I might not bother with the dubbed version because it’s not likely to matter much anyway.

I’ll try to bring a bit of sanity back with me this time, but it’s a drop in the ocean these days.

Is 5 something to do with an american company on the US West Coast who are starting to market marijuana chewing gum under the medical marijuana scheme. Thought not (but they apparently are doing just that).

Nightwatch, it’s actually a half decent film. Stick to the Russian with subtitles. I always thought “Das Boot” was so much better in German with the subtitles, Dubbing into English loses so much, but what pisses me off with subtitles is if you speak a bit of the lingo the subtitle doesn’t necessarily say what’s actually been said.

Apparently
“Mack the Knife” or “The Ballad of Mack the Knife”, originally “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer”, is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their music drama Die Dreigroschenoper, or, as it is known in English, The Threepenny Opera. It premiered in Berlin in 1928 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

“Blitzstein’s translation provides the basis for most of the popular versions we know today, including those by Louis Armstrong (1956) and Bobby Darin (1959—Darin’s lyrics differ slightly), and most subsequent swing versions.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_the_Knife

Bobby Darin – blimey, that takes me back. My mother had a bit of a thing for him. Also Lonnie Donegan, which is probably the point at which I decided she was most likely bonkers. Subsequent events have done nothing to shake my childhood conclusion. ‘My mother is bonkers’ is a firmer scientific theory than anything Einstein came up with. Nobody who has met her has ever questioned it.

Das Boot is infinitely better without subtitles. There are many brilliant German actors and some subtitles are an insult to performances from the likes of Jürgen Prochnow, Diane Krüger and Christoph Waltz, whenever these stars masterfully portrayed German characters.